ey may give us a little laboured masterpiece of art in which the vital
principle is wanting. George Eliot was great because she gave us passages
from life as it was lived in her day which will be vital so long as they
are sympathetically read.

George Eliot can be simple enough when she goes straight forward with her
narrative, as, for instance, in the scene of Milly Barton's death; then
her English is clear and sweet for she writes from the heart. But take
the opening chapter of the same story, and then you find her
philosophical Latinity in full swing: the curious and interesting thing
being that this otherwise ponderous work, which is quite of a sort to
alarm a Frenchman, is entirely suffused by humour, and enshrines moreover
the most charming character studies.

These lively and acute portraits drawn from English country life give its
abiding value to George Eliot's work. Take the character of Mr. Pilgrim
the doctor who 'is never so comfortable as when relaxing his professional
legs in one of those excellent farmhouses where the mice are sleek and
the mistress sickly;' or of Mrs. Hackit, 'a thin woman with a chronic
liver complaint which would have secured her Mr. Pilgrim's entire regard
and unreserved good word, even if he had not been in awe of her tongue.'

Or take Mrs. Patten, 'a pretty little old woman of eighty, with a close
cap and tiny flat white curls round her face,' whose function is
'quiescence in an easy-chair under the sense of compound interest
gradually accumulating,' and who 'does her malevolence gently;' or Mr.
Hackit, a shrewd, substantial man, 'who was fond of soothing the
acerbities of the feminine mind by a jocose compliment.' Where but in
George Eliot would you get a tea-party described with such charming
acceptance of whim?

George Eliot wrote poems at various times which showed she never could
have won fame as a poet; but there are moments of her prose that prove
she shared at times the poet's vision. Such a moment is that when the
half broken-hearted little Catarina looks out on a windy night landscape
lit by moonlight: 'The trees are harassed by that tossing motion when
they would like to be at rest; the shivering grass makes her quake with
sympathetic cold; the willows by the pool, _bent low and white under that
invisible harshness_, seem agitated and helpless like herself.' The
italicised sentence represents the high-water mark of George Eliot's
prose; that passage alone should vindic